Objectives: (1) to practice and
refine independent critical thinking skills; (2) to demonstrate your
ability to blend or choose expressive, objective, and persuasive
approaches depending on the specific context you create;
(3) to carefully match your style as well as content to your projected
target audience; and (4) to continue to practice drafting, revising,
and editing in order to produce your very best writing.

Ideally, college students are at a stage in their educational careers
when they undertake the challenge of becoming independent, critical
thinkers. Instead of being dependent on others to dictate how
they must think, they embrace the opportunity to think for
themselves. Emerging from passive habits of dependency isn’t
always an easy or comfortable step to take, but it’s a necessary part
of the process of becoming fully educated. College students are
therefore expected to form their own judgments about the information
presented to them and the information they discover independently. It’s
this ability to present an informed, respectful, and reasoned
discussion on any significant topic that distinguishes an educated
person.

For this assignment, you are asked to bring all of your accumulated
writing skills to the table. This semester you have had the
opportunity to fine-tune your understanding of the distinctive goals of
expressive, objective, and persuasive writing; we’ve worked at
identifying when each type of writing is or is not called for, and what
writing style is appropriate for each purpose. When and why will
you find it appropriate and useful to write expressively, offering your
own unique perspective and sharing your personal experience with
readers? When is it most effective to gain objective distance and
explore your subject analytically? What information do your readers
need? What’s the best way to present it to them? When you
want to write persuasively, how do you anticipate disputes and how can
you handle them when they arise? Will it be persuasive to simply
acknowledge differences of opinion, or do you need to negotiate or
refute those opposing views? These are all rhetorical decisions
we have worked at defining and clarifying, and now I’d like to give you
an opportunity to demonstrate how well you can take responsibility for
these decisions when tackling a writing project that you choose
yourself.

Directions:Select any current event,
artifact, or text—any book, article, film, news report, television
program, product, object, situation, event, or personal observation of
the world around you—that provokes you to reflect meaningfully on and
draw a carefully considered conclusion about some aspect of our larger
(American) culture. Build a discussion from this observation that
is based on your carefully considered response, analysis,
interpretation, or argument about some aspect of this “text.”
Your discussion should be in the form of a carefully crafted
essay. The exact shape of your essay is your own choice. It
can take the form of one of the genres we studied in The Call to Write,
one of the genres we did not study but which you can study
independently (such as the “Review” or the “Commentary” in chapters 9
and 11), or you can approach the issue of form generically.

Some general suggestions for finding
topics

Consider these broad categories: college life, teen culture,
current events, pop culture, modern trends. Is there anything
that specifically provokes you to respond expressively, analytically,
or argumentatively?

Consider choosing one the writing suggestions that Trimbur
provides in The Call to Write. You can choose to write
another memoir, open letter, profile, explanatory essay, or argument—or
you can try one of the genres we didn’t study together but which you
can study individually, such as the review or the commentary. A
commentary essay combines many of the expressive, objective, and
persuasive goals we’ve studied.